After liberal institutions spent the last presidential election lambasting current White House resident President George W. Bush as the dunce who couldn’t pronounce the word “nuclear” while morphing want-to-be White House resident John Kerry into a genius, the conservative establishment can take heart that both men’s college grades finally have been released.
Both men studied at Yale. Kerry graduated in 1966 and Bush in 1968. Turns out that—gasp—they had essentially the same grades. But some of us have already figured out who the genius really is—that would be the man who figured out how to get elected twice.
This leads me to this week’s bewilderment. The Reno Gazette-Journal often runs an online poll. The results of a recent one showed almost half of the respondents think that President Bush’s current nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, should reveal his position on abortion. I’ll leave for the moment that it isn’t appropriate for any judge to pre-judge any issue (or case) until it is actually before him or her. We all know why some want to know the answer to this little question: If Roberts is anti-abortion, then by definition he is a “right-wing ideologue” who will suddenly be labeled “unsuitable” for the Supreme Court.
That would result in a bunch of childish Democratic senators—who can’t seem to fathom why on God’s green earth a Republican president should expect a Republican-controlled Senate to approve his nominations—raising the specter of the almighty filibuster. If the answer is that he’s pro-abortion, well, that’s just hunky-dory for Democrats.
Already Planned Parenthood and NARAL have logged their “preference” for a nominee other than Roberts. These are the groups that have spent decades twisting Roe v. Wade (the case that created a woman’s constitutional right to terminate her pregnancy) into something it wasn’t supposed to be—a woman’s right to an abortion or a woman’s “contraceptive rights.”
First, let me say that the only “choice” Roe v. Wade established was for woman to decide whether she wants to terminate her pregnancy. It did not give a woman a guarantee to an abortion on demand. If some readers don’t see the difference, I suggest they read the case rather than listening to the stalwart guardians of constitutional rights, like Planned Parenthood and NARAL.
These are often the same people who tell me I shouldn’t be able to own an AR-15 because the Founding Fathers couldn’t have imagined such a weapon would ever exist and hence wouldn’t have covered it under the Second Amendment. But in the next sentence, they will piously claim this imaginary right to an abortion would have been envisioned by the Founding Fathers. (At least the term “arms” is mentioned in the Constitution. The words “abortion” and “choice” seemed mystically absent in my last reading of said document.)
Of course, the real history lesson on Supreme Court nominations is in the numbers. When President Reagan appointed Justice Kennedy, he was confirmed 97-0. When President George H. W. Bush appointed Justice Souter, he was confirmed 90-9. When President Clinton appointed Justices Ginsburg and Breyer, they were confirmed 97-3 and 87-9, respectively. The difference is that all these justices were liberals. When George H. W. Bush appointed Justice Thomas, a true conservative, the vote was 52-48.
You’d think Democratic senators would take a page from George W.’s Yale textbook and get on with the business of appointing a new justice for the American people. When will Republicans learn?